Skills

Skills are techniques that can have a variety of effects, such as direct damage, damage over time, damage after time, buffs, and healing. Skills are divided into three types: Native Skills, Physical Skills, and Magical Skills.

Native Skills are skills given when a new character is created. Every character will have two different native skills. One is a native elemental skill which is based on a character's native element and the other is a native class skill which is based on a character's race.

Characters will ever so often get Elemental Skill Points, which they may allocate to a certain elemental skill. Any single character may only receive 10 ESPs in all.

In addition, characters will receive Physical and Magical Class Skill Points upon level-up. What kind and what amount of these they receive will depend upon how they've allocated their skill points: a character that has assigned all her ESPs so far to Physical Skills will receive only Physical CSPs, whereas a character that has assigned half his ESPs so far to Physical Skills and half to Magical Skills will receive roughly equal numbers of Physical and Magical CSPs.

On HTD Day 29, Dan gave as examples a "passive" Magical Class Skill that would enable the character to wield two magical weapons more effectively and, as the player put more points into it, increase the character's Intelligence and Agility, and an "active" Physical Class Skill called Taunt that would increase the character's Strength and Stamina per point.

It currently appears that Class Skills will be the primary, and possibly only, way of increasing a character's stats. Dan explained that this system, with the division between Physical and Magical Class Skills and Skill Points, is designed to prevent extremely suboptimal builds such as a character with all his ESPs assigned to Physical Skills and all his stat increases assigned to Intelligence.

Characters will acquire Class Titles based upon how the player chose to assign CSPs and ESPs. The examples of titles Dan gave are as follows:

Warrior

Paladin

Healer

Battle Mage

Fighter

Monk

Archer

Marksman, Bowman, Ranger, Sharpshooter (subclasses of Archer)

Shadow Knight (acquired by focus on Shadow ESs)

Holy Paladin (acquired by focus on Light ESs)

Arch Mage (acquired by focus on a wide variety of (presumably magical) ESs)

Death Dealer - a character with Fire and Shadow Elemental Skills with Class Skills upping attack speed and increasing proficiency in dual-wielding melee weapons.

Note that these class titles are experimental and subject to change. It is not known if there will be any benefit to having specific class titles.